Chapter 5 examines the fate of transformative demographic governance in the eighteenth century, beginning with the proliferation of demographic numbers and political-arithmetical arguments in a range of print genres: sermons and sacred histories, literary essays and satires, newspapers and pamphlets. These encouraged a new demographic subjectivity in their audiences – a sense of participation in demographic processes – that raised questions of agency and its limits. Some concerned the constraints of environment, conceived of in discussions of medicine and public health as a partially manipulable “situation”; others concerned the power or responsibility of the public to foster the improvement of populations through projects such as Societies for the Reformation of Manners or Coram’s Foundling Hospital. In colonial contexts, debate raged over the relationship between climate, health and race, and – as Benjamin Franklin’s work shows – over both the relative fecundity of America and Europe and the ideal racial composition of the colonies and the world. By the later eighteenth century, demographic governance had become a point of contention between colony and metropole.

Chapter 4 connects the emergence of transformative demographic governance to changes in natural philosophy, in particular to Francis Bacon’s works and their influence among projectors associated with the Hartlib Circle in the mid-seventeenth century. The problem of managing the qualities of populations in an empire raised the question of natural constraints on the power of policy to “improve” populations; the chapter examines Hartlibian projects concerned with this question on a large scale, including some in which putatively immutable racial boundaries and the enslavement of Africans indicate both limits to and paradoxes of demographic governance. It then turns to Cromwellian Ireland, showing that opposed arguments for either Irish transplantation or English –Irish mixture proceeded from a similar centering of demographic governance. Mid-century projects fed into William Petty’s “political arithmetic” in the Restoration. This fused Baconianism, alchemical ideas and quantification, treating the control of the numbers and of the economic, political, religious and cultural qualities of populations in England, Ireland and the empire as essentially similar problems for the state.

The introduction states the argument and introduces key concepts, including ideas of multitude and political arithmetic, as well as important distinctions, including that between quantitative and qualitative aspects of demographic thought. It briefly surveys past approaches to the history of population as an idea, paying particular attention to Michel Foucault. It then outlines the book’s episodic approach; explains its geographical and temporal scope (England, Ireland and the British Atlantic, circa 1500 –1800); characterizes the range and types of sources used; and describes its focus on the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and qualitative manipulation (referred to as demographic governance), as well as on questions of the locus and limits of power over population (referred to as demographic agency).

“Political economy” is a Western term that carries its own, evolving ideological baggage. For John Stuart Mill, political economy was a science – that which “traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.”1 Adam Smith used the word “science,” but meant what Mill would have called “art”: for him, “political oeconomy” could be “considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” and had as its objectives “enabl[ing]” the people to prosper through their own efforts and “supply[ing] the state or commonwealth” with means of payment for “the public services.”2 Smith takes us closer than Mill to what the authors mentioned in this chapter understood as their mission. It is not that Chinese writers were incapable of identifying infallibly observed regularities, but construction of a disciplinary edifice through the systematic “tracing” of such regularities in economic behavior was not a premodern Chinese project.

The origins of sociological science are traced back to England in the second half of the seventeenth century and in particular to the contributions made by John Graunt and Edmond Halley. Their work is distinguished from the political arithmetic of William Petty in having a more general concern with population regularities and in being based on ‘reasoning with numbers’ of a more advanced kind. Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality is a pioneering analysis of social data in numerical form and characterised by a remarkably scientific attitude. Halley’s life-table represents the first application to such social data of elements of modern probability theory. Unfortunately, little was done to build on their work until the early nineteenth century.